Is it wrong if the music sounds familiar, as if you have already heard it? If I speak a language, I use the same words over and over, right? Classical North Indian music is built around 200 ragas, they have been used for many centuries, and every concert today still sounds new.

Good question, and it deserves more than one answer.

First, we know that even in popular music, novelty is more or less desirable and asked for. Generally, it would play a small(er) role in dixieland or country music. Some artists, like David Bowie or Frank Zappa, painted themselves into a corner where their audience (and critics) required constant novelty and renewal: they were almost outraged if they didn’t get it.

This is somewhat the case with modern contemporary music, at least to the extent that is presents itself and wants to be viewed as

radical

modern

avant-garde

innovative

experimental

rebellious

revolutionary

We know that just these words have been used again and again about 20th century music and composers — by critics, historians and the composers themselves.

Now I can well imagine some composers who do not see themselves in these terms (I personally would tick “radical” and “rebellious”, for my own reasons, and with my own interpretation of the words). But we also need to be honest and admit that for quite some time now there exists a phenomenon, an anomaly that could be called Traditional Avant-gardism, or Mainstream Modernism, built on an idea of Orthodox Rebellion.

Meaning that one writes in and belongs to a tradition, even an orthodoxy, but still calls (and sees) oneself a a kind of “rebel” or “revolutionary”. Forgetting that it is always the last trend, style, dogma that one needs to rebel against — if rebel one must – not the penultimate, or one that is already dusty…

The above keywords can be seen as Trademarks (TM) for much of the music written in the last 100 years. From this viewpoint, my criticism of music that “sounds just like modern music sounded 60 years ago, only not as good” is that: — you cannot call yourself modern or avant-garde for decades on end, while doing more or less that same thing that you and others have been doing for a LONG time.

There are others on the stage more modern and avant-garde than you, so this is a kind of Best Before-question.

Some of us (like me) don’t care about being “modern”, but many others do. So it’s a question of misleading labeling or marketing.

Or let’s just say marketing, which can be bad enough if we are talking about art. Sure, my symphony or opera might get some embarrassingly laudatory presentations from some PR-person, but I need not be that PR person. I notice that some modern composers are. Their salesmanship is sometimes better than their music, so maybe they should be agents for others…? Also from an economic viewpoint.

Another aspect of this has to do with signal and noise, or let’s say text (within) and outside parentheses.

It is nothing original to suggest that our times views and treats itself as a parenthesis. It writes, not like Keats but still, in water.

We in the West say “The medium is the message”. So let’s look at two ways of approaching media, and keep the image of Keat’s grave in mind.

(Both examples from memory since I don’t have my books handy.)

Clifford Stoll (super-hacker, astronomer and wonderful eccentric) describes in his book “Silicon Snake Oil” how he wanted to save some important astronomical data, but also wanted to be real sure that it didn’t get lost. So he saved to 5-6 different formats; tape, floppy disc, etc.

After some years many if not most machines for reading his data resided in museums! That’s how incredibly fast things get unreadable [turn parenthetical] in the West. A case of File Format Obsolescence.

The other example is from the Orient. A certain karate master was the last person who knew a certain Martial Arts form in its entirety. His pupils were understandably anxious that it should not die with him; it had be saved somehow. But how? In what medium? After long pondering they found the optimal solution; carving it on stone tablets!

We Westerners with our digital media, discs and tapes and USB-sticks that will soon be impossible to read (due to our craze for “updating”, which is actually a form of Progeria, accelerated ageing) truly write in water[y parentheses], while those Martian Arts people wrote on stone.

If we Westerners valued our writings, thoughts, insights more highly we would choose less volatile media. But I don’t think we do, if we are frank. We feel we are living in a period of transition, we are neither heads nor tails but the edge of the coin, a thin slice which doesn’t REALLY matter, or only matters until the next technological “revolution” sends our media readers to a museum in one more case of File Format Obsolescence.

This ties in very much with John Cage and all things “experimental”. Experiment comes from Latin experiri: “to try, test”. Of course there are always elements of experimentation in music: trying out new fingerings, different bowings, a different chord or instrumentation.

Experimentation has its place but let’s not lose sight of Yoda’s advice: Do not try, do! Our modern love of experiments and things experimental is truly trying, in more ways than one. Because anybody can experiment. There’s nothing to it. Just look around at current experiments in painting, poetry, performance, spoken word, photography, etc.

Everybody can try but not everybody can do. If that sounds like blasphemy to you then HURRAY… I’ve succeeded in being radical, modern, avant-garde, rebellious and even revolutionary!

We don’t eat experiments in restaurants, we don’t drive around in experimental cars, don’t fly in experimental aeroplanes, and so on. But we use experimental software (never finished, never grownup, always in need (it seems) of updates, upgrades and “fixes”) and we — some of us — consume experimental art and music.

All this has to do partly with ambition, partly with result.

Do you, composer, intend to write something with the hope of it becoming repertory, that is, being played again and again, enjoyed (hopefully) by a larger number of people than 27? And do you, composer, actually succeed in writing something that becomes (if it gets a fair hearing, which is of course not guaranteed) repertory and is being played again and again, enjoyed by a larger number of people than 27?

Something people will want to hear a second time?

Everybody wants to write repertory pieces, someone suggests. I am positive that is not the case. Some just want to fool around and enjoy the thrill of connecting dots, pressing buttons, inputting data into Finale or Sibelius just for the hell of it, or fiddling with patch cords.

Cordially yours.

In a way this is like producing a food product. Will it be edible just for a short while? Must it be kept on ice? Or can it stand room temperature, for years? Will your piece (we would call it short-term music) sound dated right away, at least to experienced listeners, or will it survive changes of weather, fashion, even cultural paradigm shifts?

Well, I know what my ambition is.

So back to my friends question: Must the piece be new, sound new? Is it a bad thing thing if it reminds us of something else?

I would say: Not a bad thing if it reminds of an earlier doing, but a disappointment if it sounds like an earlier trying (= experiment).

Much of 20th century music is experimental, or experiments. Even composers are called “experimental” (!), without anyone raising an eyebrow. While an experiment in and of the 60s could be new, novel and refreshing back then, a grand-child or clone of it today will just make me think of grandfather. And I will want to ask “Why?”.

Here many a composer is helped by the fact of listener inexperience. In other art spheres many a audience member (or YouTube commentator) is impressed by experimental art that is just a copy of 60s Concept Art. But since he knows nothing of Concept Art he thinks that there is something original in this rehash of 60 year old experiments!

Say what you will, Concept Art was revolutionary (in a bad way, but still). There is nothing revolutionary or daring in doing copies of the same buffoonery 60 years later. If you do that, you are a traditionalist. However, you probably want to look like a rebel… which brings us back to the BBDD (Best Before Date Dilemma).

So what I am in a way saying when I criticize pieces by “I’ve heard it before” is that they remind me of gestures, attempts, in a word, experiments that are old by now, and that haven’t convinced me of any possibility or even ambition to become repertory, of addressing Humanity and not just to a small sub-cultural clique.

Morton Feldman said it outright: We don’t need listeners and a great many composers agree with him, if not in word then in deed.

Turning your back to audience, whether it was a select salon audience, the Church, some rich aristocrat or the entire bourgeoisie, was probably impossible and unheard of until some 100 years ago. Now it has turned into a virulent bad habit (or just tradition), showing and manifesting itself by its mirror image: The audience turning its back to the composer.

Finally let’s talk about, not The Sound of Music, but The Sound of Modern Music. How was it my friend said? If I speak a language, I use the same words over and over, right?

By this time (2018) there has crystallized a set of habits and manners that can, with just a wee bit prejudice, be called the Standardized Rules of Typical Modern Music.

Favor intervals like seconds, sevenths and augmented fourths.

Avoid intervals formerly regarded as perfect: Octave, fifth and fourth, then also thirds as sixths.

No triads. That way Harmony lies!

Favor irregularity before regularity, angular before rounded, fragmented before whole.

Do give the audience a shock from time to time. Why not most of the time? Think Haydn Surprise until it becomes Haydn Non-Surprise.

Whatever you do, don’t write melodies. (This is easy, since writing good melodies is hard.)

This is not so much a language but an anti-language.

So when I say that “I’ve heard it before” it can mean that the composer in question adheres to these negative rules maybe as strictly as composers of old adhered to an opposite set of rules. Only for a badder reason: mainly avoidance.

When I hear music following this dogma I am often surprised and stunned by the conformity, even orthodoxy, of the Modern Composer. He often is so square, so well-behaved and downright proper that my jaw hangs. I want a modern composer to sound like himself, not like “modern music”.

–Yes, but do you use the same set of requirements with the First Wiennese School for example? They use Alberti bass all the time…

The answer to that is that the universe and rules of Beethoven or Mozart or Bach are very different from the rules I have sketched above — which are a set of non-rules or anti-rules, based primarily on avoidance, doing the opposite thing. That is kind of a defiant and juvenile.

I don’t know about you but I find matter more interesting than anti-matter, a person more interesting then his mirror image (which is just a reflex), principles more interesting then mere knee-jerk defiance. Thus, what I hear in modern music is not so much language – with language you supposedly should be able to say anything: Catastrophe, verfremdung, alienation as well as cozy dinner by the open fire, happy, friendly, gleeful — but only a small, partial selection of a language, a cut-out, a fragment or a limb of a language.

The way I compose, not fearing neither triads, melodies or regularity, I am free to use harsh, angular dissonance or clusters when and if I desire, but am equally free to use pleasing, even ingratiating consonance. There are no taboos in my music, thus I can take a walk in any corner of the Garden of Emotions. I can use elements of jazz, modernism, even pop music, freely. Because music, much more than information, wants to be free.